Still Local and Still Fixing Everyone Else's Problems

The past couple weeks have seen a new barrage of tech support calls. At
first, we were at a loss to explain the source of the problems. However, it
seems that "local" ISP CapeCod.com has
sold it's dial-up operations, including it's customers, to a New Hampshire
company, TTLC Internet. As is always the
case, some technical issues have arisen and fall out has occurred from the sale.

Specifically, the new company seems to have some different policies,
including a block on all outbound e-mail. This means that our customers,
those who used CapeCod.com for dial-up but hosted their domains with us,
will not be able to send e-mail through our servers. There are some possible
workarounds to the problem, but they need to be implemented on a customer
by customer basis. If you are afflicted with the problem and are unable to
get in touch with your new service provider, give us a call and we'll see if
we can get you back up and running.

The practice of blocking all outbound e-mail is not unheard of, though it is
more uncommon today than it used to be. For ISPs that can't afford to trust
their customers, it provides a relatively simple and effective way of
ensuring that their customers do not send spam. Consequently, you still see
this behavior from several of the larger ISPs and universities. Smaller
ISPs, on the other hand, can afford to deal with such problems when they
arise on a customer by customer basis.

Though the new company is based out of New Hampshire, this probably won't
make a big difference to the quality of service. C4.net has for several
years been the last company to still offer local dial-up. In other words,
when you connect the Internet, your call terminates in Orleans. Though other
ISPs may have been owned locally, none had their operations on Cape Cod.

To put it another way, we bring the Internet to Orleans on fiber optics: we
bring the Internet to you. This is important because it usually results in
less dropped lines and better quality connections as our approach involves less phone
equipment and phone lines: there are fewer points of failure the way we do it. It costs
us more to operate this way, but that's the c4.net difference.